Agreed. Some exploratory directions.
The core of dogmatism is the assumption that there is a direct link between theory and practice. You can see this vividly expressed in the history of western responses to the Chinese Revolution. On the one hand you had the RU and October League (later RCP & CPML) desperately trying to stuff u.s. empirical reality into principles derived from the concrete conditions of Chinese reality. The United Front (as developed in the practice of the CPC) presupposed (among many other things) a large (and internally stratified) peasantry, an equally stratified gentry (with its 'lower' levels barely better off than the bulk of the peasantry), a small & internally divided capitalist class, and a foreign invader! It was a united front of different _classes_, uniting interests fundamentally opposed. Hence the Chinese emphasis on "stacking one's contradictions" in the right order. The polar opposite of this (and equally dogmatic) are those western readers who, seeing that CPC principle does not apply directly to neighborhood organizing, move from that recognition to babbling about how can the experiences of illiterate Chinese peasants possibly be of interest in an advanced capitalist country (and this in turn leads to contempt for the one undoubted world classic written by any American in the 20th Century -- William Hinton's _Fanshen_.)
It is apparently this second kind of dogmatism which my post on the "middle class" unleashed. And there is really no use in attempting to reply to those caught up in such etherial realms of pure dogma. We are dealing with a theoretical question at a high level of abstraction, and there is _no_ direct application to immediate practice, which is why I gagged so at Doug's invoking of what "americans" believe about themselves. What is important here is what _leftists_ in general and _marxists_ in particular believe about the dynamic of class relations in the u.s. An understanding of class that confuses it with stratification makes this impossible.
A _tentative_ implication for practice I would draw from my initial argument is that left theorists should give serious attention to Tom Walker's {and Marx's) focus on hours. If the anti-war movement grows (and especially if it more and more unifies around anti-interventionist and not merely anti-war principles), we will confront the (delightful) problem of expanding it into a full-fledged mass movement for change. That will raise more practical questions of tactical demands, agitation and outreach and, ultimately, the question of which sectors of the working class can be reached (_at that time_ -- _now_ is irrelevant here) and on what grounds. My provisional assumption is that what _objectively_ unites the working class (in distinction from stratification of income and "life-style" variation) is control over _time_ -- both in the sense of hours per week consumed by work _and_ in the sense of the relation of present (wages, training, etc.) to future (will those wages continue, will retirement income be sufficient, etc.).
Now those questions will have to be answered in terms of actual political practice when they become directly relevant; we really cannot know at the present time whether the 'army' to struggle for public transportation will consist of minimum-wage workers or SUV drivers. But I'm relatively sure that the people who accumulate and theorize that practice will not be those who at the present sneer at SUV drivers, pronounce what kind of sexual experience is _real_, or dogmatically assume either that the principles of other struggles apply directly or that no useful abstractions can be drawn from the struggles of the Longbow peasantry.
Class analysis tells us nothing about the individual members of the class, nor do descriptions of individual members of a class tell us anything about that class. And neither can (by itself) tell us anything about what should be the content of leaflets we write to oppose the Occupation or defend social security.
Carrol